earlemerson.com

When you start a series and the series lasts long enough you’re going to have to make some decisions about time, time handled in the series and time handled in real life. Do you age the main character at the same rate you’re aging. Faster? Slower? Or not at all?
When I started Cape Disappointment it had been well over ten years since I’d written a novel in the Thomas Black series and I had more than age to consider. Thomas was in his mid or early thirties when I left him in Catfish Café. If I’d allowed him to age at the same rate as I had, he would have been closing in on fifty at the beginning of Cape Disappointment. He and Kathy  would have been married for ten or fifteen years instead of something under eighteen months. What would have made it even worse was that I would have uneventfully skipped at least ten productive years of their lives.
I decided to keep him the same age. Plenty of other fictional detectives have remained the same age. People are writing Sherlock Holmes stories now as if he were still alive.
A problem with not aging Thomas Black was that while he wasn’t going to age, at least not by much, the world around him has gone through considerable changes since I last wrote about him.
When I introduced Thomas Black in 1985 a cell phone was a large, cumbersome piece of equipment very few people had. The Internet as we know it was a dream. Today, modern investigators do much of their work, sometimes all of their work, on computers. Back then, nobody had ever heard of taking a photograph with a telephone. The thought of accessing the largest information data bank on the planet with your phone wasn’t even talked about. In Monica’s Sister, my latest and to date unreleased novel, Thomas uses his phone to take surreptitious photographs of just about everybody he interviews in the course of his investigation. These photographs turn out to have real meaning later in the book. Taking photos with a phone the size of two thumbs would have been Sci Fi in 1985.
People have changed, too. In the beginning Thomas Black drove a blue, Ford pickup, changed to a red Ford pickup by a careless artist for the original cover for The Rainy City. Editors and art directors in New York were actually impressed that Black drove a pickup. They thought it quaint, outdoorsy. These days the best-selling vehicle in the country is a Ford pickup.
Just a reminder. The Mac Fontana series is coming in e-book format. Black Hearts and Slow Dancing is now available in Kindle, other formats and titles by this summer.
Another note. In reading through the Fontana novels I’ve decided if I ever did another one, I would freeze the books in 1987, the year the first one was written. No cell phones. No home computers. No greenhouse gasses, or no worrying about them. And no five-hundred-channel television cable hookups. There is something soothing about the past.

Buy or read an excerpt here.